Shards of a Heart
by Sweethearted
Summary: AU, multichap, shipless, Clarabelle-centric. T for Language and Insinuation.
1. Chapter 1

October 2, 2011.

* * *

When I was young, they called me names. The names stung, and not just because they were cruel, spoken half in jest and half to make me hurt. They were wrong. They didn't fit. There is nothing worse than being called by a name that doesn't suit you. It's part of the magic of names, and why the stupidest thing you could ever do is to chose badly for the name you take.

One label that has always, always followed me around is 'insane'. I guess that one was kind of my fault. I never really tried to fit in, and people can't accept that. People are idiots, I guess. Hell, I was born blind, and I think most people can see even less than I could. Or maybe they could see, but never perceive, because their brains have been closed, their understanding frozen shut.

I'm not like that. I'm very open-minded. Everyone says so.

I'm the crazy girl with the Cheshire-Cat smile. I'm the one with the unsettling eyes. I'm the one who belongs in an asylum, but escapes it by working for people who don't give a damn about mental stability. I'm the retard who smiles too much.

I am fey and a temptress and a seer. I'm an oracle, a Cassandra, an ever-falling doll. I am inhuman, demonic, cursed. I'm the sweetest angel you'd never want to meet on a dark street corner.

I am clarity and I am uncertainty and I am mad. That is all I ever have been, and all I ever will be.

I am Clarabelle. I am the girl who talks about death like it's nothing, the one who'd do anything to feel, the one who is powerless to do even that. I am the girl who no one cares for. I'm the one with the eyes that shift color, that look like glass. I am the girl without a heart.

It's funny, but I wasn't always this way. I did, at one point, have a family. I could, at one point, feel. I had parents, and I had brothers. They were both younger than me – much younger. Their names were Stentor and Civet – well, they weren't then, but they did eventually choose those names. My parents loved them a lot. So did I. I think they even loved me, at one point. Just a little bit.

I am Clarabelle, and I am the girl without love.

* * *

**A/N: This is something along the third rewrite of this I've done...**

**Palsy and amusia and silent murder~  
_Sweethearted._  
**


	2. Chapter 2

October 2, 2011.

* * *

In the year when I turned five, our family was in pretty bad shape. My mother had lost her job, since she could no longer work whilst trying to care for the newlyborn twins, and my father only had a low paying Sanctuary position. Stability was a delirium dream, and I know that my parents were worried that someone would get sick, or rather, sicker, because we really couldn't afford very much more by way of doctor's bills. Not after mother's difficult birth. Not after I stepped on a nail I couldn't see and the wound got infected. Their anxiety affected me, and the household wasn't terribly cheerful.

And then, out of the blue, a miracle happened. The Sanctuary was looking for a test subject, preferably a child of magical birth who couldn't read and could be trusted to secrecy. I wasn't told what the tests would be like, though I heard the criteria and thought them bizarre. I was simply that I would be involved in them. The process was quick, and I soon found myself being handed off to Sagacious Tome. He was a Teleporter, I was told. I thought that that was an interesting thing, though I never saw the proof of it.

It turns out that they were creating a new system for protecting the Book of Names, not content with the maze of vaults that protected it and the other various artifacts the Sanctuary had acquired over time. All I would have to do, they told me, was walk over, five steps forwards, and pick up something that would be at shoulder level.

It took me a while to figure out what the object was. It was heavy, and bulky and felt kind of dusty. Eventually, though, I made the connection, from the smell of old leather and pulped tree. It was a book. Just something else I would never get to read, never fully understand.

At first it was easy, so very easy, to get to the volume. Five steps, pick up the burden, listen to the sorcerers groan, put it down, walk back, wait, repeat. It wasn't too bad, I thought. Any worries I might have had upon beginning were appeased by the fact that everything was the same as ever it was.

And then, one horrible, bitter-cold day, one that started the same as any other, the walking began to cause me hurt. That was when it all went to Hell.

* * *

**A/N: Books are precious, because all they hold are secrets.**

**Heartaches and syrup nails and cold, cold stone~  
_Sweethearted._  
**


	3. Chapter 3

May 4, 2012.

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Broken glass sinks into the soft flesh of my feet with the first step, bitingly cold and disturbingly reminiscent of the nail that I am still terrified I will once again fail to notice. Unlike the nail, though, the glass sinks away from my skin as I take another step, though it returns when I am once more in contact with the floor.

And the next step brings fire, like coals, like embers, and I feel like I am burning like a little Balinese girl performing the _sanghyang dedari_. In keeping with this, I continue forwards, two or three quick little steps before I scream.

I feel like I am falling. The floor has danced away from me, and it is like being suspended in liquid that is constantly moving and whipping me around like a rag, and I've lost most of my sense of myself.

I will myself one more step forth, and I pick up the book with hands I'm not entirely sure are there until I touch the book, which is reassuringly solid. The torments peel away from my senses, and I start laughing, because it is nice to not hurt.

The people in charge of the project, however, do not seem particularly happy. They talk amongst themselves, arguing, and for a while I try to follow along. I soon stop, though, because they are too many and too soft and my head begins to ache.

Instead, I slump against the pedestal upon which the book is kept, and carefully I stretch out my legs, half-expecting to feel fire and glass and abyss, and finding none. I rest my face against my knees, and I curl up around the book as tightly as I can.

It's been years. Three of them, in fact, and I must say, if this is the best that the Sanctuary can do, I'm not particularly impressed. They tell me, whenever they have the chance, that they are the Best, and that I am doing excellent work for the betterment of the country, and the Community At Large.

It's good to hear this, because they obviously aren't.

"Have you no dignity, girl? Get up." The voice is one that I have been told belongs to Chandra Salvere, one of the people spearheading the project. People say she's cruel, and I don't think I disagree with them.

"My head hurts," I say softly, and she pulls me up from where I am, grabbing my wrist tightly, and now that hurts too. I drop the book, and all at once the torture resumes.

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**A/N: Whether her voice is appropriate for an eight-year old or she's just an unusual child, I leave up to you. Though I'm pretty sure this is syntactically similar to how my speech patterns were when I was that age.  
**

**Actually, they remind me more of myself at age five, but meh.  
**

**Sunshine and laughter and dead butterflies~  
_Sweethearted._  
**


	4. Chapter 4

May 20, 2012.

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I don't cry at her funeral. She was a cruel woman, and I think she brought in on herself.

Maybe she'll be reincarnated as a bug, or a small rodent. Something that destroys, because that's all I never knew her as.

Maybe she'll be a rat.

Maybe she'll step on a rusty nail.

The one thing about her death that was good, really truly good, not sickeningly amusing like the way she screamed when she felt for just a moment before her demise what I have been feeling every day for such a long time, was that people started talking about why I was okay and she wasn't. And that started new tests, only these were pleasant. I was allowed to talk to people gently, in a civilized way, and solve puzzles and identify things by touch – soft things, beautiful things. They played music, and I told them what I heard.

They gave me a new name, and that one fit, finally. _Seraph_, they called me. _Burning One._

_Angel._

And now that all this is done, the testing with the book starts again, but without pain, because according to them, any pain that could stay me would be out of their power. What happens instead is that I will want, less and less, to approach the book, to pick it up.

On the third day, it works, and I am done. On the fourth step, I am stilled, can no longer care any to retrieve the book, and so they make the fourth step the first and try to take the book themselves. They fail, as per their expectations, and so there is rejoicing.

And when they are finished with their exultation, they tend to me, reward me even though they have already paid my mother for my life. They bring me to a doctor named Kenspeckle Grouse who has a low, cracking voice and soft, gentle hands, and he does something to my foot that makes even the occasional stabs of pain disappear, and then he asks me if I believe I have a soul.

I tell him that of course I do.

He asks me if I would like to be able to see.

I tell him that of course I would.

He asks me if I think that a soul is still a soul when it's broken up and that is when I get scared because he's just another sorcerer looking for someone to test on. I am about to try and run away when he tells me not to.

His voice sounds like nails.

* * *

**A/N: And so the plot begins to become clear.  
**

**Sunshine and laughter and dead butterflies~  
_Sweethearted._  
**


End file.
